


Every Day Is Any Day (Leoben, Five, and Starbuck Rise to Greet the War)

by sageness



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Canadian 6 Degrees
Genre: Canon - TV, F/M, M/M, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-30
Updated: 2006-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:30:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageness/pseuds/sageness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We'll see you," Leoben said, and Five shut his eyes and died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Day Is Any Day (Leoben, Five, and Starbuck Rise to Greet the War)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for c_regalis, who gave the prompts: metal, Doral, blood. With special thanks to malnpudl and stormymouse for looking at early drafts. The title, "Every day is any day," is from Gertrude Stein's "Wars I Have Seen". This story was written after the trailers appeared but before Season 3 aired and has been thoroughly jossed…so let's say it happened like this in another cycle.

By the time their transport maneuvered its way through the toxic dust, Five was bleeding and sweat-soaked, and the cloying stench of the Ragnar's rusted, dripping interior hung around him like a cloud. They could smell that he wasn't going to make it.

 

"I hate that place," Five muttered. He was wheezing and covered in cold sweat. "Feel like I'm melting from the inside."

 

"You did well," Leoben said from the seat next to him.

 

Leoben had lived and died in a lot of places, and he wouldn't mind forgetting Ragnar Anchorage. The radiation sickness from the atmosphere didn't get any easier with repetition.

 

"I don't know how you lasted as long as you did."

 

Leoben leaned his head back and spoke slowly, remembering. "The water made music. It rang against the metal and echoed. Measuring wavelengths distracted me from the cell degeneration."

 

Five stared at him for a moment. Then his eyes rolled back as he went into convulsions. When the seizures lulled, his eyes were glassy and his motor control was gone. "This is it," he mouthed.

 

Leoben took his hand in a tight grip. On Five's other side, Eight and Six were grasping his forearm and thigh. Another Five was interfacing with their light transport. He called back, "Half an hour, Aaron," and Five managed a smile.

 

"We'll see you," Leoben said, and Five shut his eyes and died.

  
*  
Explosive decompression wasn't the most painful way he'd ever died, but it was one of the most memorable.

 

At least Starbuck had been there then, both to bear witness and to pray his soul home for him—even if it had taken longer to transmit than any other Cylon had done this cycle.

 

When he finally woke anew, he listened to Six recount the story of Kara Thrace and the Arrow of Apollo. Six would have happily killed her if she'd been allowed to; but she was only permitted to go so far. As it stood, it was a small miracle that Six hadn't accidentally broken Starbuck's neck during the fight.

 

But the Sixes liked to test people and test them hard, and for Kara, Six deemed a hard test necessary. Leoben knew what was necessary, and he didn't disagree.

 

After Leoben came back from being spaced, Five stared at him with a mixture of fascination, distaste, and confusion for so long that Leoben finally pinned Five to a bulkhead and said, "Stop."

 

"Stop what?" Five said, struggling.

 

Leoben only—or almost only—dealt with the Fives when a mission was at stake. He didn't gel with their model, never had. Ten minutes into any conversation, they were guaranteed to be shouting—faith versus fact, precedent versus propaganda. The Fives always doubted the plan would work. They doubted it every cycle.

 

Leoben shoved him harder into the wall. "She's part of our destiny. It's God's plan: she has a part, I have a part, and you have a part. Accept it."

 

Five stopped moving and Leoben released him. Rolling his shoulders and smoothing out his clothes, Five stuck his chin out and said, "She's horrible, even for a human. And you, you _like_ her—that's what baffles me the most."

 

Leoben narrowed his eyes. A flash of memory and he was grinning into Five's face.

 

"What?" Five asked.

 

"This," Leoben answered, and kissed him.

 

"Hmm," Five replied through the kiss.

 

The kiss continued down the short corridor to Five's quarters, where it paused briefly while they navigated the doorway. It resumed in Five's bunk, continued through the careful disarrangement of their clothing, and stuttered its way through their slow rubbing and grinding to orgasm.

 

"Hmm," Five said again.

 

"Yeah," Leoben agreed. He tended to limit his non-autonomous sexual relations on basestars to female models and other copies of himself, but he was willing if it would reduce the antagonism between himself and this Five.

 

Five began cleaning up. Leoben did as well, but with less meticulous care.

 

"Do we need to talk?" Five asked after a minute.

 

Leoben gave the question fair consideration, then shook his head. "You?"

 

"I have my role, you have yours, and she has hers," Five recited. "I don't have to like it."

 

"Many roles, many cycles," Leoben replied, as he stood up. He raised an eyebrow and Five nodded. Then he turned and left.

  
*  
"That isn't good." At the sound, Leoben opened his eyes: Five stood in the doorway taking in the scene.

 

Starbuck was gone and had taken the little Kara he'd brought—that part was fine; but Leoben lay on the floor bleeding freely from the throat. She'd missed the artery somehow. If she'd sliced it instead of the jugular, he'd be waking up in a birthing tank a couple of minutes from now; but she hadn't, so he was lying in a pool of his own blood calculating the amount of damage this body had sustained.

 

If it was bad enough, they would simply kill him, thus activating a new copy. If it wasn't, they'd deliver him to surgery to repair the damage.

 

New clones were still not in infinite supply—not anymore—and every agent had been advised against wasting bodies.

 

Five stepped out of the way as a surgical team entered. Big, clunking hulks with fine-precision instruments built in to their arms. God's perfect medics.

 

"Doral," Leoben tried to whisper, but it came out a wet burble of bloody air.

 

Five crouched down next to him. "It's all right," Five said, wiping sweat from Leoben's brow.

 

The medics wanted Five to leave, but Leoben protested to the one he was interfaced with. "You can't let them kill her," he mouthed.

 

Five sat back on his heels. "You—every time she does this you defend her, and she keeps on doing it!" He plucked the wet hunting knife out of the medic's secondary forceps and held it in front of Leoben's face. "Is it possible that you actually enjoy being killed?"

 

Leoben glared up at him as the medic on his right extruded a wide, flat tube from its left wrist and fed it down Leoben's throat.

 

"Or is it only when _she_ does it?" Five amended. Then he stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Leoben to the clank of his brethren and the gathering darkness of the surgical system override.

  
*  
He woke to the taste of metal in his mouth and a retching feeling in his gut. Then a cool cup of purified water was pressed to his lips and the room brightened with the dim glow of the light pod in the corner.

 

Five sat on the edge of the bed holding the cup to his mouth. Leoben couldn't turn his head, and the swelling in his throat made it difficult as hell to swallow.

 

"Spit," Five said, holding a different cup to Leoben's mouth. He did. "Good. Now drink more." He did that as well, and then relaxed back against the thick foam wedge elevating his upper body.

 

"Did you know this was going to happen?"

 

"Doral—" he whispered, surprised that any sound came out.

 

"Yes or no."

 

Leoben shrugged. "Eventually."

 

"You allowed her to endanger the mission," Five snapped, standing up.

 

"She _is_ the mission." Leoben rasped. Then he swallowed hard and started coughing. She'd cut him badly enough to be an inconvenience; he could feel the plastic nodule they'd inserted into the wall of his trachea and the polymer sheathing they'd used to reattach the severed vein and muscle fibers.

 

"Don't cough, you'll rupture it." Five leaned down to hand him the water again and Leoben drank gratefully. "I think you're a fool," Five said.

 

"You don't know her, Aaron."

 

"You and she are too much alike." Five stood with his hands folded and all his attention focused on Leoben. "By that I mean you're both inexcusably reckless."

 

Silence fell until Leoben answered hoarsely, "I'm not arguing." Five snorted. Leoben smirked back at him, and then asked, "How are the girls?"

 

"Upset," Five said, settling again on the edge of the bed. "They miss their sister. Fully half of them have announced their intent to go next."

 

Leoben smiled a slow, pleased smile. Even so young, they were almost completely fearless.

 

Five flexed his hands. "If we can train them—"

 

"We can."

 

"And keep them safe until Starbuck returns to blow us all up—"

 

"She won't kill her daughters, Aaron."

 

Five sighed and shook his head. "She will if she has to. I would."

 

"You aren't her." Leoben yawned, and then worked his throat. The pain receptors were still blocked, otherwise it would've been impossible.

 

"Go back to sleep. Heal yourself."

 

"Lie down with me," he whispered, scooting over.

 

Hesitating for a moment, Five straightened his coat and stretched out at Leoben's side, but the slope of the raised medical padding made it awkward until he gave up the ruse of personal space and curled into Leoben's side.

 

"Better," Leoben grunted, and wrapped his arm around Five's shoulder, soaking in the warmth of this Five's body. Normally Leoben might've sent him away and asked another of his own model to come to him, but Five was here and Leoben was tired and he liked the feel of the velvet under his hands. Perhaps they were already at the part of the cycle where they stopped struggling against one another.

 

"I don't understand it," Five murmured, addressing the bed. "How many times has she tried to kill you? And how many has she succeeded?"

 

Or perhaps not. "This wasn't intended to kill."

 

"You don't know—"

 

"I do, just like I know that last time she tried to save me."

 

"So you keep saying," Five muttered acidly.

 

Leoben shut his eyes and listened to the throbbing of the wound in his throat. He'd been shocked when she'd done it, and that was new. Or perhaps very old. The cycles folded in on themselves sometimes, in his perception, and it was sometimes difficult to recall when her gentleness and violence coincided or traded places.

 

"You know my role in all of this," he whispered after a while.

 

Five shifted up onto an elbow and glared. "Like I said, I don't have to like it."

 

A wry smile touched Leoben's mouth. "No one does, Aaron."

 

Five shook his head and then slowly slid back into place against Leoben's body. "I hate this," he whispered. "I distrust everything about it."

 

"It'll be over soon," Leoben said, rubbing a hand up and down Five's back, tracing patterns in the velvet until he drifted off.

 

Five rose, then, and slipped out of the room, as he had no excuse to remain.

  
*  
Leoben came awake in the birthing tank. Some copies of some models awoke screaming, but he never did. Since the second time, he always remembered who he was before drawing his first breath.

 

"You're an idiot," Five said from somewhere off to his right. "She blew you to smithereens."

 

Leoben smiled and finally opened his eyes. "She got away?"

 

Five crossed his arms over his chest. It was the green suit today. It was softer than the red. Nothing was as soft as the warm, saline gel he was nestled in, but the green velvet would be close.

 

"Of course she got away," Five mumbled.

 

Leoben nodded and let his eyes fall shut. Another copy of himself knelt on his other side and was gentling his hands over Leoben's wet hair and skin, helping to adjust his hypersensitive nerve endings to the new environment. If it were any other model, it would've been too much, but his own hands were just enough.

 

When he could stand it, Leoben reached out and touched the back of Five's hand with a single fingertip. The heat and texture and blistering intensity of the electromagnetic current in Five's skin shot up through Leoben's arm and sent a shudder through his whole body.

 

"Thanks," Leoben said, slipping his hand back under the gooey surface, "for letting her go."

 

The other Leoben's hands slid down his body, cupping, kneading, and stroking. Five grunted, watching, and didn't leave.


End file.
